Truman (14 page)

Before there was any alleviation he had to suffer at least two further humiliations. In September there was the severance from Wallace. Truman sacked him. This was one of the few popular things he had done for some time. For Wallace, who had so nearly been President of the United States, it was the end of effective power. In 1948 he ran as the Progressive Party candidate for the presidency and started impressively, but in the outcome Truman was able to brush him aside like a fly. Thereafter he had seventeen
years of decline, during which he even became disenchanted with most of his own left-wing views. For Wallace it was therefore downhill all the way after 1946. For Truman there were to be a lot of roses. Yet the rupture which set two of Roosevelt's vice-presidents upon these divergent paths was at the time incomparably worse for Truman than for Wallace.

Truman simply made an ass of himself. Wallace, probably wrong on the issue of how to deal with the Soviet Union, left with dignity and looking as though he had carried a considerable part of Truman's constituency with him. He was engaged to make a foreign policy speech in Madison Square Garden, New York, the arena in which he had upstaged Truman in 1944, on September 12th. A day or two before he came in and read most of it to the President. Truman either did not listen, or thought that he agreed with it. In any event he approved it. When the text was released during the day of the speech it created a furore. It was manifestly at odds with the foreign policy that Byrnes was pursuing and Truman was supporting. The President was cross-questioned about it at a routine press conference that he was holding that afternoon. He endorsed the speech, and expounded the manifestly absurd proposition that it was in line with Byrnes's policy.

A day or two later he tried to pretend that he had merely endorsed Wallace's right to make the speech. This line clearly could not be held. So he tried to retreat to one of mildly rebuking Wallace and getting him to promise that he would make no more foreign policy speeches until Byrnes returned from the foreign ministers' conference which was currently taking place in Paris. Then Wallace leaked highly prejudicial accounts of the long meeting with Truman which had led to this limited truce. Next, under pressure not only from Byrnes but from Senators Vandenberg and Connally, Truman's patience cracked, and he dismissed Wallace with an intemperate letter. Then he withdrew the letter and requested the resignation more temperately by telephone. Then he half-hesitated. ‘[Henry] was so nice about it I almost backed out,' he wrote. But the deed was done, although in about the worst possible way. It was certain that he was much to blame. It looked as though he had only acted under the crack of the whip of his Secretary of State, for whom he no longer had any respect. And, although in his private writings he subsequently indulged in rather routine denunciations of Wallace, there is from the same sources the steady
impression that he liked Wallace more than most of his colleagues, and indeed admired several aspects of his rather elusive character.

The whole farce lasted for eight or nine days. Truman was in no private doubt about his own responsibility. ‘Never was there such a mess and it is partly my making,' he wrote to his mother and sister on September 18th, ‘But when I make a mistake it is a good one'.
¹⁷
‘I don't think I ever spent a more miserable week since Chicago,'
⁶
he added to his wife on the following day.

The second humiliation was that he was allowed to take no part in the Congressional elections. He accepted the strong advice of Robert Hannegan that the less the electors saw or heard of him the better would be the chances of the Democratic candidates. The candidates themselves were almost all of the same view. Some played recordings of Roosevelt's voice. None requested similar support from the incumbent president. Once he had reluctantly accepted Hannegan's advice, they would not have got it even had they asked. He journeyed silently across half the continent to vote in Independence. He went by special train but he made no whistle-stop speeches from the rear-platform. Even in his own state, where the train stopped three times, he confined himself to a little hand-shaking with local politicians.
¹⁸
He held no rally in Independence, he made no election-eve broadcast.

He spent election night in the same train on the way back to Washington. When he awoke to hear the disastrous results he decided that the Democratic Party needed a new National Chairman (Hannegan had foolishly accompanied his crushing advice with a complacent prediction of the outcome if it were taken), and a new streak of steel in his own soul. Henceforward he was going to be more his own man as President.

At Union Station in Washington there was no one to meet him except Dean Acheson, then under-secretary at the State Department. His lonely, distinguished presence on that railroad platform was in a curious way symbolic of the transition from the first phase of the Truman presidency. Acheson was certainly not a crony. He was a Connecticut gentleman (the son of a bishop) of acerbic intelligence and patrician presence. He had no great wealth, but his education was that of the core of the Eastern establishment: Groton, Yale, Harvard Law School. He never sought elective
office. He probably could not have achieved it, for not merely did he not suffer fools gladly: he extended the definition of fool to cover a fairly high proportion of the human race. In his later years he came to embrace, at any rate for the purpose of argument, some fairly eccentric and even reactionary views, but in his middle years he served Truman, America and the whole western world first as under-secretary and then as Secretary of State with a wisdom and flair which made the calumnies to which he was subjected by some Republican members of Congress a squalid disgrace.

The symbolism of his presence at the station on November 6th was two-fold. First, the fact that he was alone showed that Truman's fortunes were at a low ebb. Second, the fact that it was he, and that the President was delighted to see him and insisted on taking him back to the White House for a drink, indicated that Truman was coming to feel at home with a wider and different group from the Missouri cronies and very political politicians with whom, hitherto, he had felt he could alone relax; two and a half years before he would have been amazed to have been told that he would rather have seen Acheson than Byrnes. Third, it showed that his fortitude, decisiveness and high public spirit was attracting the loyalty and admiration of men who could help him fashion the next remarkable phase of American foreign policy. General Marshall would soon be back from China. There were some bright spots on the horizon. Maybe the US cavalry would arrive in time to save his presidency.

In the meantime, however, the morale around the stockade was fairly bad. On the following day such an intelligent Democratic senator as William Fulbright made the extraordinary suggestion that the President should appoint Vandenberg Secretary of State, and then resign, which in the absence of a vice-president and with the constitution as it was then was, would make Vandenberg president. A Republican chief executive could speak to a Republican legislature. Mrs Roosevelt, who perhaps had her own reasons for always being remarkably friendly and encouraging towards Truman, if occasionally a little chiding, wrote more perceptively that Truman might do better with a Republican than with a disloyal Democratic Congress.

Truman thought the same. In any event he was determind to behave like a liberated man. I do not believe that at that stage he had any more faith in his chance of re-election than did most of
his fellow citizens. But he was resolved to make the best he could of his remaining time. ‘From now on I'm going to do as I please and let ‘em all go to hell,' he wrote to his mother and sister on November 18th. ‘At least for two years they can do nothing to me and after that it doesn't matter.'
¹⁹

He started with a good holiday in the surprising location of the submarine base at Key West, Florida. He handled John L. Lewis's renewed coal strike with much more sureness of touch than he had shown in the spring, and achieved his capitulation on December 7th. He rose in the polls and got his best press for a long time past. His Christmas holiday in Independence was even briefer than in the previous year, but his spirits were higher, and he approached 1947 with the desperate self-confidence of a man who felt that things had been so bad that they could not easily be worse.

Truman began the hinge year of 1947 on the presidential yacht
Williamsburg,
steaming up the Potomac. He had been for a short New Year's Eve cruise with his staff. He got back to the White House at 8.45 a.m., and soon afterwards telephoned his wife and daughter in Independence. He then recorded: ‘Never was so lonesome in my life. So I decided to call the Cabinet
¹
and ex-Cabinet officers.' The ‘lonesomeness', a not infrequent complaint, raises the question of why such an uxorious couple as the Trumans chose to spend so much time apart. The President did not
have
to spend short–and sometimes less short—holidays on masculine boat trips. Mrs Truman did not
have
to spend several months a year in Independence.
²

The telephoning however appears to have been a great success, so much so that Truman went on from present and former Secretaries to embrace by electric wire General Eisenhower, Senator Vandenberg, Republican majority leader in the Senate, and even Congressman Martin, the new Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives. At that stage he was not confronting or denouncing the Eightieth Congress.

Truman's most important companion for 1947, and the one whom he would probably most like to have greeted on that New Year's Day, was not available. General of the Army George
C. Marshall had recently moved with the Chinese Nationalist government 1500 miles down the Yangtse from the gorges of Chungking to the plains of Nanking. The change had made him somewhat more accessible, but not sufficiently so for the Bell Telephone Company, brilliant though its performance appeared to Europeans in the 1940s and 50s, to be able to reach him. His mission to this doomed government, almost the only failure of his life, but a failure which was neither his fault nor a significant tarnish of his reputation, came to an end five days later. Fifteen days after that he was sworn in as Secretary of State. He held the senior cabinet office for almost exactly two years. Then ill-health forced him to resign and be replaced by Acheson. Twenty months later, recovered, reluctant but as always loyal in accepting assignments, he came back as Secretary of Defense for one year. He and Acheson between them were crucial to the international success of Truman's presidency. Yet it would be quite wrong to see them as crutches supporting a lame man. Acheson more articulately, but both in their differing ways, regarded their commitment and achievement as stemming essentially from their regard for Truman's leadership and character. As the one was as different from the other as each was from Truman it was a remarkable triangle of disparate respect. It did a great deal to make the Western world of the past four decades. And no period was more crucial to this artefact than the two years of Marshall's tenure of the State Department.

This said, Marshall's quality is not easy fully to comprehend for those who did not know him. He had a high sense of duty, exceptional natural authority, steadiness of judgment, and power of decision. This formidable combination of attributes was enough to make him a great man. But what is more surprising is that the reserve, self-sufficiency and air of impeccability which went with them allowed him also to be likeable. He was always controlled. He never misbehaved. He always spoke in a low, quiet tone to which everyone listened. He always arrived and left every gathering at precisely the time that he intended to. He accepted the few disappointments of his life, most notably Roosevelt's decision to keep him as Chief-of-Staff rather than to allow him instead of Eisenhower to command ‘Overlord', without remonstrance. He also accepted calmly the upset of private plans which were involved in his several (apparently reluctantly accepted) recalls to public
duty. He never appears to have lost his temper. ‘I have no feelings,' he told Dean Acheson, ‘except those I reserve for Mrs Marshall.'

It is almost too good to be true, particularly as it was accompanied by what would in a lesser mortal have been considered a certain pomposity of parlance. He always announced himself on the telephone as ‘General Marshall speaking'. It was almost as though he had been christened ‘General'. As a result nobody—not even Roosevelt, certainly not Truman—except for Mrs Marshall and an obscure major-general who had presumably been at the Virginia Military Institute with him, called him anything else, not even ‘Mr Secretary', let alone ‘George'.

Yet, on a wide range of testimony, no one found him pompous or priggish. Margaret Truman, meeting him for the first time when she was barely twenty and before her father was vice-president, wrote, ‘I fell in love instantly with this remarkable man … He was marvellous at making you forget his importance, while simultaneously making you feel that you and what you were saying were important to him.'
¹
Dean Acheson, who served under him for his first six months as Secretary of State, succeeded him, and then served alongside him when he returned as Secretary of Defense during the Korean War, wrote of him as ‘this noble and generous man,'
²
and recorded the pleasure which he derived both from having him to very small dinners in Washington, when he arrived as precisely at seven as he left at nine, and from visiting him on Sundays at his house at Leesburg, Virginia.

Truman himself wrote of Marshall: ‘The more I see and talk to him the more certain I am he's the great one of the age.' This was within a month of his becoming Secretary of State, but the President never subsequently changed his opinion. He also enjoyed a day at Leesburg, although it did not correspond with his normal choice of a pattern of entertainment.